Center for the Humanities: Audiences

This semester the Center for the Humanities explores a new theme, Audiences. Most Monday nights this term at 6 pm in the Daniel Family Commons, Wesleyan faculty and distinguished visitors will present new research. The conversations that develop after the talks help create new paths of thinking for everyone present. On Tuesday mornings, there are follow-up seminars at the CFH. Here’s a description of the theme:

The CFH theme “Audience(s)” asks us to explore the phenomena of the audience from multiple perspectives. How does audience shape the form and function of our work? Is the desire to reach a wider audience consistent with our academic or artistic goals? How should we reflect on the relation of intellectuals to their audience or audiences in general? What can the audience tell us about past or present works of scholarship, theater, music, politics or art? Does the audience shape the work and intention of the author or is the reception by the audience the moment where meaning happens? In what ways are we able to understand either the intended or actual audience for a work? What effect do existing normative practices have on the role of audience in respect to those who do not conform to them (i.e. those who do not conform to existing conventions of masculine or feminine for instance)? In addition we are eager to explore the ways in which audience behavior is changing in the new media environment and the ethical and social ramifications associated with measuring audience behavior on new media platforms. How might an understanding of multiple audiences help or complicate the issues raised above?

The series begins tonight (Feb 3) with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown, who will be talking about gender, media and privacy. You can find out more here.

This Weekend: Super Theater and Athletic Competition

This weekend the Brooklyn-based theater collective The Assembly brings HOME/SICK to the Center for the Arts. “HOME/SICK tells the story of a handful of student activist leaders in the 1960s who, searching for justice and an end to the Vietnam War, became convinced that violence could pave the way toward peace. With ambitions to overthrow the government, they formed the Weather Underground after taking control of the Students for a Democratic Society movement in 1969.” The play combines the personal and the political, the anecdotal and the historical, and we are fortunate that this group of young alumni (and others) are staging the work at the CFA. You can read more about it here.

There is also a tide of sports events crashing into the Freeman Athletic Center this weekend. The men’s and women’s basketball teams will see plenty of action Friday night and Saturday afternoon, and the track team will be competing against a bunch of teams in another invitational. Men’s hockey is at home Saturday and Sunday…while many of our other squads are carrying the Red and Black on the road.

The semester is only just getting underway, but I suspect these artists and athletes are already at the top of their game.

 

 

 

We Can Stop Violence Against Women

As I concluded my time in Washington D.C. this week, I was impressed to see the following statement released by the White House. First, it quotes Vice-President Biden:

Freedom from sexual assault is a basic human right.  No man has a right to raise a hand to a woman for any reason — any reason — other than self-defense.  He knows that a nation’s decency is in large part measured by how it responds to violence against women.  He knows that our daughters, our sisters, our wives, our mothers, our grandmothers have every single right to expect to be free from violence and sexual abuse.  No matter what she’s wearing, no matter whether she’s in a bar, in a dormitory, in the back seat of a car, on a street, drunk or sober, no man has a right to go beyond the word “No”.  And if she can’t consent, it also means no.  That too makes it a crime.

President Obama then went on to say:

It’s about all of us — our moms, our wives, our sisters, our daughters, our sons.  Sexual assault is an affront to our basic decency and humanity.  And for survivors, the awful pain can take years, even decades to heal.  Sometimes it lasts a lifetime.  And wherever it occurs — whether it’s in our neighborhoods or on our college campuses, our military bases or our tribal lands — it has to matter to all of us. ….

So sexual violence is more than just a crime against individuals.  It threatens our families, it threatens our communities; ultimately, it threatens the entire country.  It tears apart the fabric of our communities.  And that’s why we’re here today — because we have the power to do something about it as a government, as a nation.  We have the capacity to stop sexual assault, support those who have survived it, and bring perpetrators to justice. …

Today, we’re taking another important step with a focus on our college campuses.  It is estimated that 1 in 5 women on college campuses has been sexually assaulted during their time there — 1 in 5.  These young women worked so hard just to get into college, often their parents are doing everything they can to help them pay for it.  So when they finally make it there only to be assaulted, that is not just a nightmare for them and their families, it’s an affront to everything they’ve worked so hard to achieve.  It’s totally unacceptable. …

My hope and intention is, is that every college president who has not personally been thinking about this is going to hear about this report and is going to go out and figure out who is in charge on their campus of responding properly, and what are the best practices, and are we doing everything that we should be doing.  And if you’re not doing that right now, I want the students at the school to ask the president what he is doing or she is doing.  And perhaps most important, we need to keep saying to anyone out there who has ever been assaulted, you are not alone.  You will never be alone.  We have your back.  I’ve got your back.

I applaud the president and vice-president for taking on this crucial issue. In a blog over the summer I wrote that “violence of any kind has no place on our campus, and sexual violence is particularly pernicious in that it plays on social stereotypes and traditions of exclusion. We applaud groups active across the country, like Know Your IX, which are calling on students to stand up for their right to study in environments free from discrimination, harassment and violence. This work is perfectly in accord with our mission to promote progressive liberal arts education for all.”

I know that we can constantly improve our practices and policies for dealing with sexual violence on campus, including violence against gay, lesbian and trans students. We do this not out of an effort to appear to have the correct politics or to avoid bad press and law suits.  We do this, as I’ve said before, because freedom from gender and sexual violence is essential to our mission as a community of learning. An inclusive learning community is one free of violence, and that’s the kind of community all of us — students, faculty and staff — work to build at Wesleyan.

The Obama administration is right to call attention to this vital issue. If anyone at Wesleyan has ideas about things we can do better in this area, please let me know. By eradicating sexual violence, together we can make our campus more inclusive and equitable.

Welcome Back!

It’s great to see students back on campus despite the bad weather, and I’m looking forward to the start of classes – as I always do! The cold over these next days will doubtless provide an encouragement to stay indoors and get a good start on the kind of highly productive work that distinguishes faculty and students at Wesleyan.  🙂

Over the break the Wes community has surely done some celebrating, but faculty have also been preparing their classes, doing their research, and working on various educational projects. I’d like to extend a special thanks to those faculty who have been spending some time on camera to help us prepare our new Coursera class: How to Change the World.

Some students got an early start to the semester with our Winter Session and Winter on Wyllys programs. The interest shown by students augurs well for the future of these programs. And of course many of our athletes have been here competing vigorously.

Great teaching makes Wesleyan the outstanding liberal arts institution that it is, and in that regard I’m so pleased to announce that Quiara Alegría Hudes, a Pulitzer Prize recipient, will be the new Shapiro Distinguished Professor of Writing and Theater for three years beginning in the fall of 2014. Quiara served as a visiting playwright in 2012, and I have no doubt those of you who met her then will share my excitement about the return of this gifted artist. Also, noted New York Times film critic A.O. Scott will be teaching this semester in our brand-new College of Film and the Moving Image, a marvelous opportunity for the students selected for his criticism class.

Last week I joined leaders from 100 universities and 40 nonprofit groups at the White House to discuss improving access to higher education. There is no greater challenge facing higher education because research has shown that far too many highly capable students from lower-income families are not enrolling in selective universities and colleges. It’s essential that we do a better job of finding and enrolling these students if we’re going to make progress in addressing the growing economic divide in this country.

Wesleyan will do its part. We are committed to increasing the number of QuestBridge scholars on campus – low-income and first-generation students who receive full scholarships.

We will work to expand efforts to retain students from under-represented groups in STEM fields, including development of a summer bridge program and more introductory science courses revamped to support retention, as successfully demonstrated by the biology department. We’ve also partnered with the Posse Foundation to enroll 10 military veterans each year, and last week I celebrated with our first “posse” in New York. These students will join the class of 2018 in September, adding to the rich diversity of our student body.

As the new semester begins, Wesleyan renews its commitment to boldness, rigor, and practical idealism.  Welcome back!

Expanding Access and Creating Opportunity

Last week gave me plenty to think about in regard to creating more opportunities for students to pursue a liberal education at the college level. On Tuesday night, I met with the extraordinary group of veterans who will be starting out at Wesleyan in the class of 2018. While they come from a wide variety of backgrounds, their experience in the military has had a powerful impact on all of them as they prepare for the next stage in their education.

The next day I headed to Washington for a gathering of college and university presidents concerned with creating greater access to higher education for students from low-income families. But access isn’t enough. We also discussed how to improve preparation for college work in the K-12 sector, and also how to ensure that those students we do admit will be successful as undergraduates. Michelle Obama told us that education as opportunity was the story of her life, and she movingly described her own path from working class Chicago to Princeton. She also made the important point, echoed by many others, that low-income students had many assets when compared to those who grew up with privilege. These students had already learned from their struggles; they already had overcome obstacles in ways that prepare them for leadership. We needn’t feel sorry for these students, the First Lady emphasized, we just need to understand how to leverage the strengths they were already bringing to the table.

President Obama made the point that economic recovery without social mobility would undermine our society, and that education was a key to social mobility. Only 9% of students from the bottom economic quintile attend college, but 90% of this group that completes college won’t remain at the bottom of the economic ladder. We can do a lot better than 9% in the United States, and we here at Wesleyan will find ways to do our part. Our alumni remind us again and again: education creates opportunity — not just for a higher salary, but for a more meaningful life.

At Wesleyan we will continue to make financial aid our highest fundraising priority. Our THIS IS WHY campaign has raised more than 320 million dollars, and the majority of those funds will go to the endowment, mostly to support scholarships. I know that some question how I can call for greater access to college when I have also said that Wesleyan cannot be fully “need blind” at this time. Here’s the answer: we remain about 90% need blind, and we will strive to do more. But we must have a sustainable financial aid program, one that doesn’t economically undermine the very educational program to which we are creating access. We must not use our financial aid resources “blindly;” we must use them intentionally to create access where it will matter the most.

Of course, I would prefer not to have to worry about how to pay for the Wes educational experience we value so much. But our endowment, substantial as it is, does not grant us that luxury. So we build the endowment now, with financial aid as our highest priority. Through fundraising and smart endowment management, we will be able to afford to be need-blind in the future without resorting to high loans or tuition increases just to preserve the label. We will no longer raise tuition aggressively, nor will we increase loan requirements. We will gratefully raise more money for scholarships so that a decade from now we will be in a position to promote access without undue worry about how much that will cost.

But we don’t have to wait a decade to do more now. We can use our financial aid dollars to meet the full financial need of every student at the university. In addition, hundreds of Wesleyan students and dozens of faculty and staff are already engaged in helping students in the K-12 system enhance their learning. Over the next several weeks I will be meeting with leaders of many groups involved in this effort to see how we might join forces under the banner of college readiness. We can work together to give students in Middletown and surrounding communities more opportunities to be prepared for and have success in higher education. We can do what Wesleyan folks have always done: advance our own learning by doing good in the world.

Ours is not a perfect situation, but it is one that we can build on to expand access and create opportunity.

Welcoming Veterans as Part of Class of 2018

On Tuesday evening I attended the ceremony honoring the cohort of veterans who have been selected to begin their education at Wesleyan in the fall. With this group, we join with the Posse Foundation and Vassar College in expanding educational opportunities for the men and women who have served in the armed forces since 9/11. We plan on accepting groups of ten veterans through this process each year.

The Posse Foundation’s philosophy is to provide educational opportunities to students from under-represented groups who support and inspire one another in strong cohorts. The 10 Early Decision students have served in Iraq, Afghanistan and here in the United States. They have this in common: a strong desire to support one another as they pursue a broad, engaged liberal education at Wesleyan. Having already gone through a rigorous selection process, they seemed very much ready to join our campus community. I know they will make important contributions to it as they interact with students, faculty and staff.

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This year we have also decided to increase the number of Questbridge scholars in the class of 2018. Questbridge Scholars add significantly to our diversity as they enliven our classrooms, stages and playing fields. At Wesleyan we don’t have unlimited resources for scholarships, but thanks to generous donors at all levels, we can use our scholarships to make a profound difference in the lives of individual students and in the character of our community. I’m very grateful for the contributions we’ve received that make these and other financial aid initiatives possible at Wesleyan.

This week I will be attending meetings on college access at the White House. I hope to learn about more ways that we can leverage our resources to create new opportunities for low and middle income families.  While we raise money for financial aid endowment, we are already finding ways to offer enhanced scholarships within a sustainable economic model. This will mean keeping our tuition increases in line with inflation, and maintaining financial aid as a fundraising priority. The THIS IS WHY campaign has already raised more than $300 million, the majority of those funds going to the endowment. This will enable the university to become less dependent on tuition, so that we can truly disregard the financial capacity of applicants and meet full demonstrated need without requiring excessive loans.

At the end of the festivities with Posse, our new members of the class of ’18 joined me in a boisterous GO WES!! I can hardly wait to welcome them to campus.

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Athletes Soar During Break

I just learned that last weekend Kiley Kennedy ’16 set a new Wesleyan record in the pole vault, clearing nine feet, ten inches. The old record stood for more than a decade, but at a meet at Yale Kiley flew right over it! Sierra Livious ’14 was our top finisher of the weekend, as she got the attention of those Division I schools with her prowess at the shot put and weight throw. Kimora Brock ’15 was outstanding in the 800 meters. Congratulations all!!

This coming weekend the track team will be in competition at the first of three consecutive Wesleyan Invitationals. As I stumble around the fitness center, I’ve run into some of our hard working tracksters. They seem more than ready.

Other groups that are more than ready are the basketball and hockey teams. Are you on campus or near Middletown? Tomorrow, Tuesday, January 14 at 7 pm, the men’s basketball team will take on a tough Amherst squad. On Friday, both the men and women hoopsters are at home, as is the men’s ice hockey team. You can see the schedule here.

I’ve got to go back on the road myself, but if you can come out to cheer the Cardinals, the Freeman Athletic Center will be jumping!

 

Winter Studies and Competitions Begin

Temperatures have dropped over the last couple of days, and we’ve had a few inches of snow here in Middletown. Winter is really here.

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Wesleyan athletes are already back and competing (congrats to women’s ice hockey on a strong win last night), and in a few days our Winter Session pilot program will be underway. Students will be studying foreign policy, statistics, the graphic novel, and computer science, and they will be doing so in a very intensive way. Another group of undergraduates will be working in Fullbridge’s “internship edge” program, while still others will be enrolled in programs through the Wesleyan Career Center. I look forward to hearing their reports on how we can make the best use of these early January weeks.

I am preparing my online and campus classes (having just turned in my grades for the fall semester). In the administration we also use this time to evaluate how we are doing on our annual goals. I’ve read through all the proposals on new ways to energize campus learning, and there are several terrific ideas on which we will be following up early in the semester.

Winter is here, and it’s time to start making 2014 a great year for Wesleyan!

Year-End Thanks

Dear friends,

This year has been exciting in so many ways, and as it draws to a close I want to express my gratitude to the entire Wesleyan family for their many contributions to making our university the creative, caring and engaged place it is. I think back to the first-Friday MASH (the music festival that began to tap into the amazing vitality of students, faculty and staff), the competitive fire of our athletes, the generosity of our volunteers, the passion of our activists…these were all on display over the course of the year. In this, my seventh year, the student body continues to surprise me with its exuberance, commitment and ardent devotion to pursuing lives of purpose and meaning.

In this season, I like to remind folks to check out the faculty bookshelf. From philosophical considerations of concern and communication, to histories of the Ottoman Empire, from accounts of how we learn from experience at the personal level, to accounts of how we have failed to do so at the policy level, our faculty continue to shape the culture all around us. The scholars who produced this work are also spirited teachers who inspire students every week of the semester.

None of the scholarship and teaching would take place without the thoughtful and dedicated contributions of the Wesleyan staff. They make all these achievements possible. The staff’s determined, inventive efforts—from reading admission files to planning graduation events—are at the heart of all we do.

The Board of Trustees guides this institution with generosity, care and intelligence. Whatever differences we may have about specific policies, we are all dedicated to ensuring that our university remains at the forefront of progressive liberal arts education. I am grateful for being part of this team.

With best wishes for a restful break, a joyful holiday and a very happy new year,

Michael

Paying Attention to Attention

Yesterday the Washington Post published my review of Daniel Goleman’s Focus. Ever since my student days at Wesleyan, I’ve had a strong interest in psychology, and watching the increasing vitality of neuroscience on campus (and beyond) in recent years has been fascinating. As a teacher, I often think about the conditions that allow students to really get absorbed in material — be it film, philosophy, literature or history. And I also think about the near constant stream of distractions. I was glad the Post asked me to weigh in on Goleman’s popular consideration of attention.

 

In the mid-1990s, Daniel Goleman was able to respond to a real cultural need with his bestseller “Emotional Intelligence.” Drawing on the previous decade’s more restrained research on measuring emotional capacity, he boldly argued that tuning into your own and others’ feelings is even more important than the problem-solving skills measured by IQ tests. For Goleman, lots of stuff fell under the rubric of “emotion” — even such things as trustworthiness and teamwork capabilities. Cultivating emotional intelligence sounded a lot like cultivating goodness; it was hard to be against it.

In “Focus,” Goleman looks at the process through which one “tunes in” — whether to emotions, ideas or complex systems. He has a long-standing interest in meditation, and in this book he is able to combine that concern with new research on emotional intelligence, neuropsychology and learning. Whether alone or with others, in certain forms of meditation you learn to monitor your thoughts, to find focus or let it go. Through the practice of meditation, you become more capable of directing your attention — and that can lead to greater happiness and connection to others.

Goleman rightly worries about the hindrances to this capacity to turn oneself to something or someone, and to stay focused. On the other end of the spectrum from the absorptive practice of meditation lies the incessant itch of social media. Technological changes have increased demands on our attention, bombarding us with reminders that there is information that we might look at, queries we might answer. Goleman quotes the economist Herbert Simon on the tidal wave of data coming at us: “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Simon wrote that in 1977.

“Focus” makes the important point that “the power to disengage our attention from one thing and move it to another is essential for well-being.” Excessive stimulation from our devices, and just from the crowds around us, makes it increasingly difficult to become fully absorbed in anything at all. And full absorption, for Goleman, is fundamental to happiness.

Like many other popular psychology writers, Goleman thinks it’s helpful to refer to parts of the brain to lend credibility to his analyses of our behavior, feelings and thoughts. In discussing a crying baby, for example, he writes about an “agitated amygdala,” as if that had more explanatory heft than just talking about an agitated child. He notes the brain’s “executive” function: “Executive attention holds the key to self management.” But that’s the same as writing that self-management is the key to self-management. His “look, this part of the brain is lighting up” approach to explaining human behavior can at times be just crude. It often adds little or no value.

Goleman keeps returning to brain circuits to make the point that we don’t have a natural ability to stay focused on complex systems and long-term problems. That’s why, he says, folks don’t want to think about the effects of climate change or overpopulation. But why is saying “it’s our brains” a better explanation than saying that people don’t often think about the long term because that makes it harder to think about the short term? Anxiety over punishment, Goleman writes, “actually hampers the child’s prefrontal cortex while he is trying to concentrate and learn,” as if it’s the cortex and not the child that is doing the trying. Why not just say that anxiety hampers the child?

Be that as it may, the book has many interesting points to make about the relationships among focus, empathy, learning and even leadership. Goleman writes about cognitive and emotional empathy, the former as seeing things from another person’s perspective, and the latter as a feeling of compassion and attachment for another. He associates the intellectual aspects of empathy with the highly developed parts of the brain, while the emotional aspects are tied to the deep, primitive brain. Whether this localization of functions helps us understand fellow feeling or not, Goleman’s main point is crucial: “Empathy depends on a muscle of attention.” Exercising this muscle requires self-awareness: “We read other people by tuning in to ourselves.”

So self-awareness helps expand our capacity to be aware of the perspectives, experiences and feelings of others. And this is where Goleman is at his best, describing techniques that expand our comprehension of ourselves and others. Positive reinforcement tends to work better than dire warnings of disaster. For example, there are Web-based apps, such as Handprinter, that emphasize what we can do about climate change, rather than just reminding us how dire the situation is. In schools, there are smart modes of practicing that increase a child’s ability to learn, combining mindfulness and emotional intelligence training with traditional academic subjects. Here the neuroscience does seem to make the presentation more compelling. Goleman explains that games designed to improve attention skills in children enhanced neural scaffolding in measurable ways that benefited emotional and cognitive abilities.

In addition to his work on meditation and emotional intelligence, Goleman has also written for the lucrative business market. Tuning into this opportunity, the penultimate section of this book is titled “the well-focused leader.” Leaders, he tells us, guide the attention of others, and successful leaders “manage” their inner world and their relationships. He offers other bromides, including “we are all leaders in one way or another.” Happily, he says nothing about which parts of a leader’s brain light up when he or she is best inspiring the team.

“Focus” has real moments of insight, strong pages on interesting research and its potential applications. Unfortunately, in trying to be all things to all readers, Goleman’s book fails to consistently sustain and repay our attention.